Cyber Attacks Pose Major Threat

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The web has been around for a quarter of a century now. It brought with it boundless opportunities. Unfortunately, with all of the benefits, we've also seen many hazards. One that any company which operates online needs to be aware of is cyber attacks -- especially nowadays, when they seem to be getting worse. Keep reading for some idea of how bad it is, and what's being done about it.

Tuesday, March 16th of 2010 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the registration of the first .com domain name. Essentially this means that on that day, what we now call the commercial Internet was born. Obviously, this revolutionized the world, but according to Ken Silva, the chief technology officer of Verisign, the company that runs that very .com top level domain, this revolution also brought with it a whole lot of trouble--especially recently.

On the day of their twenty-fifth anniversary, the company was essentially forced to launch an upgrade they're calling Project Apollo, which will cost them upwards of $300 million. Why is that, you might ask? It's because of the overwhelming threat of cyber attacks they're experiencing.

This infrastructure upgrade will take place over the next ten years, allowing Verisign to multiply the number of DNS queries they're able to handle, meaning the number of requests a server can convert from a domain name to the IP address where the site is hosted.

According to Silva, these attacks are called "distributed denial of service" (DOS) attacks, which are characterized as "floods of data from hijacked PCs that cybercriminals and cyberterrorists use to knock their victim's sites offline." Apparently, these types of attacks are growing at an alarming pace; they're actually growing faster than the normal use of the Internet. "Over the next decade, these attacks could easily be a thousand times as big as they are today," Silva said.

Let's find out more about the cyber attacks that are plaguing the Internet, as well as discuss the Cyber Security Act and how online attacks are causing American companies to lose millions of dollars.